


kingdom come

by windupgirl



Category: Assassin's Creed - All Media Types
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-09
Updated: 2017-01-09
Packaged: 2018-09-15 22:00:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 694
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9259292
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/windupgirl/pseuds/windupgirl
Summary: They bury their father in the rain.





	

They bury their father in the rain. The February cold is bitter and bone-deep, and it’ll snow soon; the dawn-coloured clouds are low and heavy with the promise of it, so bright that it hurts to look. When the wind rises you can smell it, phantom cold cutting clear through the iron smell of churning industry further north in Croydon, in London. The silvery morning is very quiet, as if all the world is in breathless anticipation of the snowfall. Even the talkative fieldfares are silent in the hawthorns, waiting; over the whisper of sleet against Evie’s umbrella all Jacob hears is the vicar’s voice raised in prayer and the low murmur of the gravediggers’ conversation.

They’re stood indecently close, a gaggle of carrion birds passing a hip-flask back and forth while they wait for their turn at the corpse. Jacob envies them their gin and their indifference; the loss of his father sits in his belly like a stone, and he doesn’t know what to do or say to make it stop. It’s a strange sort of grief, when he never loved his father—but he feels it all the same, as keenly as the cold, and he knows Evie feels it too.

She’s very pale against the black crepe of her mourning dress, and her eyes are too bright, shimmering wet with tears she’s too proud to shed. Jacob reaches out to touch her hand and she gives him the barest smile of gratitude, links her cold fingers with his and squeezes the warmth back into them. When they commit their father to the earth he leans into the shelter of her umbrella and kisses her cheek; behind them George sighs wetly and Jacob wonders if he might be crying.

As the gravediggers lower the lead-lined coffin into the ground, red-faced and straining with the weight of it, the silence settles again, and with it the sense that something is irrevocably changed. Jacob doesn’t want to face it. He wants to go home—wants to bring Evie to the Oakbrook and play Old Maid until they’re both drunk and the unwieldy burden of their loss doesn’t matter; he doesn’t want to stand here bowed under the weight of grief he doesn’t understand, drenched and shivering with the terrible cold.

The vicar in flimsy white linen is rheumy-eyed and grey at the mouth and too old for this charade, a token funeral for a friendless outcast mourned only by his heathen children and their aging mentor—but his prayers are heartfelt and earnest; the old man is only tired, only eager to see Ethan Frye’s immortal soul spirited away to its final judgement. He casts a handful of frozen soil down into the grave, ashes to ashes, earth to earth. They recite the Lord’s Prayer in a disjointed low murmur, the gravediggers too with their caps doffed and held over their hearts. After the service, Jacob stands at the lip of the grave looking down, but it’s just a casket down there and he can’t imagine his father inside. 

“Come along,” George says at last. His teeth are chattering and he looks older than he did this morning. “Let’s get warmed up.”

*

After the season’s first snowfall they return to lay flowers, blood-dark roses in full bloom and pale zinnias with petals soft as kidskin, trembling clusters of cyclamen and fragrant hyacinths wilting already in the white winter cold. Framed by slender branches of sword-lilies, the bouquet has the look of some pagan offering laid out to appease the black spectre of death, and Jacob feels a chill.

It’s fifty years before they see the grave again. They come on the summer solstice and find the churchyard overgrown, drenched in golden summerlight and teeming with songbirds in the high branches of trees that were saplings the last time they were here. Their father’s headstone sits askew and pale with lichen, long-neglected, and the walk has Jacob aching in his bones—but he’s glad they came; when he kisses the palm of his hand and lays it against the sun-warmed stone, it feels like making amends for every monstrous thing that happened in London.


End file.
